In 2014 for example, "Scott Aaronson predicts, scientific publishing will move away from the current journal-and-conference model to a model that takes better advantage of online tools." I have now tried three times with different groups of colleages to make use of an online wiki or at least Google docs to avoid sending emails with updates and files or links around. I have failed three times, afaics for no reason other than that it was apparently too much of a new thing to try. Taking into account that physics is allegedly quick with adapting new tools, I think Scott is off by at least a decade. Scientific publishing will move when more than half of all tenured faculty will have been born past 1980.

In 2015 "Voting by phone" is on the timeline. Given that in Sweden you can make your tax reimbursement by phone (yes, I did!), and text messages are about to replace stamps, I wouldn't be surprised if the Swedes will be the first to make this reality.

Should mankind still exist in 2100, NYT readers believe that "physical sciences produce abundance so great that wealth becomes meaningless as a difference between people" and we'll be living in a post-scarcity world. This estimate seems to be ignoring reality. My personal estimate would be some thousand years later, maybe even longer, and that only under the condition that progress continues sufficiently long for us to find a sustainable way to meet our energy requirements.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

In this year, they have more than tripled their birth weight and they have grown more than 50%. In terms of growth, Lara is still ahead of her sister, meanwhile 2cm taller and 2 pounds heavier. In an amazing demonstration of neural network growth, the girls have learned to smile, to laugh, to hold their head, to turn around, to grab and to pick up crumbles. They have learned to eat from a spoon, to crawl, to sit up, and to stand. They have been through all vowels and are currently working their way through the consonants. They like to take and give toys, and as of lately have learned to throw them. They have both made the first stumbling step, but still deem crawling safer.

Lara has meanwhile two teeth and has found out that grinding them makes her daddy draw funny faces. Gloria has one tooth and now discovers all the possible ways to make noise with it, like running it up and down the bed posts or biting on cups.

It is interesting that while the girls are very different in character, they have made all developmental steps almost simultaneously. If one of them learned something new, the other would soon follow. The one exception is that before Lara could crawl, she had a phase of moving by rolling sideward that Gloria entirely skipped.

Every month, somebody told us the worst is yet to come. The worst are the first three months because they don't sleep through the night. The worst are months four to six because they sleep less during the day but can't yet use any toys, so want to be entertained around the clock. But wait, the worst are months six to nine because they get mobile and you can no longer just put them somewhere and go about your own business. Months nine to twelve are the worst because they get teeth and there goes your night rest. Now that the first year comes to an end, we've been told 12 to 18 months are the worst, because they start to walk and you can't leave them alone for a second. And just wait till they start talking!

As for me, the worst were month -3 to 0, everything after delivery was a vast improvement; I clearly wasn't constructed to carry around 17kg excess weight.

Still, this year has been very exhausting to say the least. We changed an estimated 5000 diapers, picked up pacifiers 20000 times, and our commuting from Heidelberg to Stockholm and my occasional conference attendance has been organizationally challenging. Scientifically, it went better than expected, in that I did manage to write two proposals (one of which was meanwhile declined however), gave a few talks, am organizing a workshop, and did indeed publish a paper. For me, the main problem working from home is the difficulty staying in touch with colleagues, which is also why there are some papers in the pipe that are not making much progress.

Stefan and I, we have been fighting now for more than a year with various institutions in Germany and Sweden for our parental benefits. Just in time for Christmas, we received good news: three quarters of what Stefan applied for has been approved. The problem with the remaining quarter is a fundamental incompatibility between counting in German and Swedish. The Germans count the months of parental benefits starting with the day the child is born (i.e. the 29th in our case); the Swedes count from the 21st on. In addition, the Germans count a month of leave as "taken" even if only one day has been taken. Based on this, they have calculated that for us the year 2011 has 13 months, and we've applied for one month in excess since we mistakenly assumed the year has 12 months.

We still haven't seen a single cent child allowance.

We have also encountered an ambitious local photographer, who has plastered the town with advertisements for "baby-shooting," and whom you have to thank for the creative arrangement in the below photo.

Monday, December 26, 2011

While I was looking for fodder for the advent calendar, I came across this story in "A Passion for Discovery," by Peter Freund. Freund, a professor emeritus for theoretical physics, recalls anecdotes that he has witnessed or has been told throughout his career, such as this one:

Cranks approach scientists more often than you would guess. The main strategy for dealing with them is never to get into an argument, for they will not spare any of your time to convince you that they are right. The other useful trick is to convince the crank that you do not have the required expertise to be initiated in their sacred truth.

Another strategy: Academician N.N. Bogoliubov at Moscow State University was once approached by a crank. "I unfortunately am not qualified to discuss your work" Bogoliubov told the man, "but Academician Lev Landau is working on related problems. He is the man you are looking for." [...]

On another occasion... two men from the Shah of Iran's Vienna Embassy showed up [at the Institute for Theoretical physics in Vienna where the author was located at that time]. One of the two Iranians excitedly told us about their discovery, while his companion nodded along. They had apparently discovered that time does not exist. Their proof was eminently simple. "By the time I say now, now is already over. Quot Erat Demonstrandum." Did we not agree that this was a major discovery, and what should they do with it? Armed with our two principles, we agreed that the discovery was major and suggested they work out all its implications, especially practical applications, for they would likely make a great deal of money. This did the trick; the two left happy men.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

We wish all our readers a merry Christmas! And if you're not into heathen traditions turned Christian turned capitalist, we wish you a peaceful and happy day anyway :o) As promised, we conclude our advent calendar with a quiz:

Erwin Schrödinger had a daughter with the wife of which physicist colleague? (First and last name, 11 letters.)

The catholic church of which town has windows that were designed by an artist with education in physics who used pictures of three-jet events, spectroheligrams and Feynman diagrams? (6 letters)

Which physicist introduced constants of length, mass and time with the motivation that they would be meaningful also for extraterrestrials? (Last of his middle names, 6 letters).

According to a study published in the Journal "Sex Roles" in 1979, at which age in months are human female infants the cutest? (Write down English word for the number.)

Which chemical element forms together with chloride a solid that at room temperature is blue in its pure form but turns purple when it binds (pure) water? (6 letters)

Approximately at which volume, in liters, does an (average) human stomach burst, according to a study performed on organs of deceased, published in Revue médicale de la Suisse romande, in 1885? (One digit).

If you write down the answers in the order of the questions you should get a string with 34 symbols. The following entries give you the solution to this year's quiz: 33-11-1-24-15-34-17-27-31-20-22-26-23.

This year's prize is a BackRe(Action) mug and it will go to the first who submits the right answer in the comments. (For the shipment, we'll need your snail-mail address. If you are not willing to provide your address, please do not spoil the fun.)

Hint: The answers to question 1,3,4 and 6 can be found on this blog. The answers to question 2 and 5 can be found on Wikipedia. If I notice you're stuck, I will provide more hints in the comments.

The only movies [Bohr] liked were Wild Westerns (Hollywood style), and he always needed a couple of his students to go with him and explain the complicated plots... But his theoretical mind showed even in this movie expeditions. He developed a theory to explain why although the villain always draws first, the hero is faster and manages to kill him. This Bohr theory was based on psychology. Since the hero never shots first, the villain has to decide when to draw, which impedes his action. The hero on the other hand acts according to conditioned reflexes and grabs the gun automatically as soon as he sees the villain's hand move. We disagreed with this theory, and the next day I went to a toy store and bought two guns in Western holders. We shot it out with Bohr, he being the hero, and he "killed" all his students.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Ernest Rutherford is known for his achievements in atomic and nuclear physics, most essentially the insight that the mass of the atom is concentrated in a small nucleus. This is known today as the Rutherford model of the atom, and was experimentally shown by scattering alpha particles on gold. Rutherford won the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1908 for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances.

In 1933, he gave a talk at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, from which he was quoted in The London Times of September 12, 1933 about the possibility of energy-efficient nuclear fission as follows:

We might in these processes obtain very much more energy than the proton supplied, but on the average we could not expect to obtain energy in this way. It was a very poor and inefficient way of producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine. But the subject was scientifically interesting because it gave insight into the atoms.

One timely word of warning was issued to those who look for sources of power in atomic transmutations ‒ such expecations are the merest moonshine.

It is easy to invoke this statement as a further example for a severe scientific misjudgement by a senior scientist. But in context, it was perfectly reasonable: Rutherford was discussing nuclear reactions tiggered by the proton beam from the then brand-new accelerator of Cockroft and Walton. Trying to gain nuclear energy that way is about as efficient as producing antimatter at CERN to fuel a matter-antimatter-annihilation engine.

Moreover, in his paper Atomic Energy is "Moonshine": What did Rutherford Really Mean?, historian of science John G. Jenkin argues that Rutherford was well aware that there might be ways to harness nuclear energy, especially using neutrons as tools to induce reactions. He suggests that Rutherford "in all of his later negative pronouncements regarding the possibility of atomic energy, was adopting a quite deliberate policy to disguise and postpone, for as long as possible, the awful prospect that he saw looming over the horizon: a new and dreadful war, a new and devastating weapon, and unprecedented destruction."

On a lighter side, Rutherford also allegedly warned (quoted for example in "The Strangest Man: The hidden life of Paul Dirac" by Graham Farmelo):

and said about special relativity (quoted for example in "The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige" by Burton Feldman):

"Oh, that stuff. We never bother with that in our work."

Though I am not sure about the origin of this latter quotation.

Rutherford was reportedly skeptic about special relativity in its early days, and for most of atomic physics it can be safely neglected and one does indeed not have to bother. But when in 1930 he prepared a new and updated edition of his book "Radiation from Radioactive Substances", he did add a discussion of the mass defect based on E = mc².

We [Werner Heisenberg and Felix Bloch] were on a walk and somehow began to talk about space. I had just read Weyl's book Space, Time and Matter, and under its influence was proud to declare that space was simply the field of linear operations.

"Nonsense," said Heisenberg, "space is blue and birds fly through it."

This may sound naive, but I knew him well enough by that time to fully understand the rebuke. What he meant was that it was dangerous for a physicist to describe Nature in terms of idealized abstractions too far removed from the evidence of actual observation. In fact, it was just by avoiding this danger in the previous description of atomic phenomena that he was able to arrive at his great creation of quantum mechanics. In celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of this achievement, we are vastly indebted to the men who brought it about: not only for having provided us with a most powerful tool but also, and even more significant, for a deeper insight into our conception of reality.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The web is full with anecdotes and quotations about physicists and mathematicians. It would not be difficult to fill a whole year with stories Google put at my fingertips, but then I could as well make them up myself. The time-intensive part of this advent calendar has not been to find the stories but to find out if they have a reliable source. Inevitably, some widely spread stories, if they had any source at all, turned out to have been altered several times, much like a digital game of Chinese whispers.

One such story is for example that of Niels Bohr and the horseshoe. The version on this website goes like this:

"An American scientist once visited the offices of the great Nobel prize winning physicist, Niels Bohr, in Copenhagen. He was amazed to find that over Bohr's desk was a horseshoe, securely nailed to the wall, with the open end up in the approved manner (so it would catch the good luck and not let it spill out). The American said with a nervous laugh,

"Surely you don't believe the horseshoe will bring you good luck, do you, Professor Bohr? After all, as a scientist --" Bohr chuckled.

"I believe no such thing, my good friend. Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not."

In some other versions that you can find online it's a student who asks the question, in yet some other versions the horseshoe is not above the desk but above the door to Bohr's cottage. The above version is particularly interesting for the amount of irrelevant details that somebody or maybe several people have added. Wikipedia lists the quote as disputed.

To find the origin of that story it is useful if you speak German, since it goes back to Werner Heisenberg's book "Der Teil und das Ganze" (The part and the whole). Most of the book is a recollection of conversations Heisenberg had with Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli, among others. Heisenberg wrote down these conversations long after they had taken place, so one should not expect the exchange to have been word by word exactly as he reported. Heisenberg finishes Chapter 8 on "Atomphysik und pragmatische Denkweise" (atomic physics and pragmatism) with an anecdote that Niels Bohr told:

Niels finished with one of these stories he liked to tell on such occasions: "Near by our vacation house in Tisvilde lives a man who has a horseshoe above his door, after the old superstition that it brings luck. When a friend asked him "Are you superstitious? Do you really believe the horseshoe brings luck?" He replied "Of course not; but they say it also helps if you don't believe it."

~Werner Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze, 1973, p. 112/13

So if you plan on winning a Nobel prize, be careful with the anecdotes you tell. Later generations might unashamedly turn the narrator into a subject and the details may be buried in translation.

Once Fermi had to attend a meeting of the Academy of Sciences at the Palazzo di Venezia, which was strongly guarded because Mussolini himself was to address it. All other members arrived in large foreign-made limousines driven by uniformed chauffers, while Fermi drew up in his little Fiat. At the gate of the Palazzo he was stopped by two carabinieri who crossed their weapons in front of his little car and asked his business there. According to the story he told to the author of this book, he hesitated to say to the guards: "I am His Excellency Enrico Fermi," for fear that they would not believe him. Thus, to avoid embarrassment, he said: "I am the driver of His Excellency, Signore Enrico Fermi." "Ebbene," said the guards, "drive in, park, and wait for your master."

In good tradition, we'll finish our seasonal program with a quiz, which is prescheduled for December 25th, 4pm Central European Time, that's 10am on the East Coast. This year's prize is a BackRe(action) mug (see photo), though of course it's more about the fun than about the prize.

Every year I put together the questions and use Stefan as a guinea pig. If he manages to solve the quiz in less than 10 minutes it's too easy. If he hasn't worked it out in 2 hours, taking into account that he knows fairly well the likely sources I have used, it's too difficult. On the Stefan-scale, this year's quiz is more difficult than the ones before, so don't miss it!

Monday, December 19, 2011

In September 1919, Ilse Schneider was working on her Ph.D. thesis in philosophy at the university of Berlin on the "space-time problem in Kant and Einstein". She did profit from the fact that the creator of the theory of relativity was a professor in the physics department: She attended Einstein's lectures, and met regulary with him to discuss the meaning and implications of his theory.

At that time, Einstein was eagerly waiting for news about the results of the British eclipse expedition by Eddington, who had tried to measure the deflection of light by the sun as predicted by the general theory of relativity. Einstein's theory of general relativity is a remarkable achievement of a brilliant mind that knew how to make use of mathematics. Einstein had to try around somewhat before he found the correct equations, but once he had arrived there, he had little doubt they did describe nature correctly.

Suddenly Einstein interrupted the reading and handed me a cable that he took from the window-sill with the words, "This may interest you." It was Eddington's cable with the results of the famous eclipse expedition. Full of enthusiasm, I exclaimed, "How wonderful! This is almost the value you calculated!" Quite unperturbed, he remarked, "I knew that the theory is correct. Did you doubt it?" I answered, "No, of course not. But what would you have said if there had been no confirmation like this?" He replied, "Da könnt' mir halt der liebe Gott leid tun. Die Theorie stimmt doch." ("I would have had to pity our dear God. The theory is correct anyway.")

We thank Toby Bryant for reminding us of that story! According to the Einstein biography by Albrecht Fölsing, Einstein did receive a telegram from Lorentz in Leiden on September 22, 1919, reporting preliminary results on the light deflection as compatible with the prediction of general relativity.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Werner Heisenberg is well known for his analysis of the inevitable uncertainty in observations with a microscope that eventually lead him to formulate the uncertainty principle. Less known is the origin of his obsession with microscopes. In 1923, Heisenberg was heading towards the final oral examination for his doctorate. He passed mathematics, theoretical physics and astronomy just fine, but he run into troubles with experimental physics where he was to be examined by Wilhelm Wien.

Wien had required that Heisenberg did a "Praktikum" (basically a practice in physics experiments), but there was some equipment lacking and Heisenberg wasn't interested enough to find out where to get it. He thus turned towards other things without looking much into the experiments he was supposed to do, for example measuring the splitting of spectral lines by help of an interferometer. Then came the day of the oral exam:

"Wien was annoyed when he learned in the examination that Heisenberg had done so little in the experimental exercise given to him. He than began to ask him questions to gauge his familiarity with the experimental setup; for instance, he wanted to know what the resolving power of the Fabry-Perot interferometer was... Wien had expained all this in one of his lectures on optics; besides, Heisenberg was supposed to study it anyway... But he had not done so and now tried to figure it out unsuccessfully in the short time available during the examination. Wien... asked about the resolving power of a microscope; Heisenberg did not know that either. Wien questioned him about the resolving power of telecopes, which [Heisenberg] also did not know."

Wien wanted to fail Heisenberg, but Sommerfeld, in whose exam on theoretical physics Heisenberg had excelled, put in a strong word for Heisenberg. Heisenberg passed the doctoral examination with the lowest possible grade. Many years later Heisenberg would recall

"So one might even assume, that in the work on the gamma-ray microscope and the uncertainty relation I used the knowledge which I had acquired by this poor examination."

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Enrico Fermi is famous for his ingenious ways to arrive at quantitive estimates for the solution of complicated physical problems. One of the most legendary examples is his estimate of the energy released by the first atomic bomb. As Fermi himself recalls in My Observations During the Explosion at Trinity on July 16, 194,

About 40 seconds after the explosion the air blast reached me. I tried to estimate its strength by dropping from about six feet small pieces of paper before, during, and after the passage of the blast wave. Since, at the time, there was no wind I could observe very distinctly and actually measure the displacement of the pieces of paper that were in the process of falling while the blast was passing. The shift was about 2 1/2 meters, which, at the time, I estimated to correspond to the blast that would be produced by ten thousand tons of T.N.T.

Emilio Segrè, who witnessed the event together with Fermi, gives a few more details. In his biography Enrico Fermi, Physicist, he writes that Fermi had done the necessary calculations in advance, "having prepared himself a table of numbers, so that he could tell immediately the energy liberated from this crude but simple measurement."

At Los Alamos, Enrico Fermi had the role of an "oracle": Because of his enormous knowledge and competence in all areas of physics, he was consulted for all kinds of physical problems. However, his mastery of physics could be intimidating to other physicists.

Some twenty-five years ago, I met a colleague of mine emerging from the office of Enrico Fermi. He told me that he had been discussing physics with Fermi; and after a moment's pause asked, "Why am I doing physics? I should probably be a grocer".

Friday, December 16, 2011

This is a story one cannot escape if one studies physics in Frankfurt am Main.

In 1922 Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach demonstrated the directional quantization of angular momentum by sending silver atoms through an inhomogeneous magnetic field. Silver has only one electron in the valence shell, so the orbital angular momentum vanishes and only the electron spin contributes to the total angular momentum of the atom. Depending on the orientation of the spin relative to the magnetic field, the atom takes one out of two trajectories, leading to a discrete splitting of the beam after it passed the magnetic field. Classically, one would expect a smooth distribution. This experiment, conducted in Frankfurt am Main, is known today as the Stern-Gerlach experiment, and was one of the milestones on the way to quantum mechanics.

But it was not just the ingenuity of the experimenters that lead to success since originally Stern and Gerlach couldn't see anything on the screen that should be showing two discrete lines. Dudley Herschbach, who won the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1986, retold Stern's description of the discovery as follows:

"After venting to release the vacuum, Gerlach removed the detector flange. But he could see no trace of the silver atom beam and handed the flange to me [Stern]. With Gerlach looking over my shoulder as I peered closely at the plate, we were surprised to see gradually emerge the trace of the beam... Finally we realized what [had happened]. I was then the equivalent of an assistant professor. My salary was too low to afford good cigars, so I smoked bad cigars. These had a lot of sulfur in them, so my breath on the plate turned the silver into silver sulfide, which is jet black, so easily visible. It was like developing a photographic film."

The complete story of Stern and Gerlach's experiment can be found in Physics Today 56 (December 2003) Stern and Gerlach: How a Bad Cigar Helped Reorient Atomic Physics (pdf), by Bretislav Friedrich and Dudley Herschbach. They also went on to test the plausibility of this story and repeated the original experiment at its 80st anniversary. The found that bad breath alone wouldn't do the trick, but that more likely Stern was actually puffing on a cigar when Gerlach handed him the invisible result.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

In 1903, briefly before the dawn of Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, Albert Abraham Michelson offered his view on physics:

“The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.”

~A.A. Michelson, Light waves and their uses, University of Chicago Press (1903)

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Hilbert had a student who one day presented him with a paper purporting to prove the Riemann hypothesis. Hilbert studied the paper carefully and was really impressed by the depth of the argument; but unfortunately he found an error in it which even he could not eliminate. The following year the student died. Hilbert asked the grieving parents if he might be permitted to make a funeral oration. While the student's relatives and friends were weeping beside the grave in the rain, Hilbert came forward. He began by saying what a tragedy it was that such a gifted young man had died before he had an opportunity to show the world what he could accomplish. But, he continued, in spite of the fact that this young man's proof of the Riemann hypothesis contained an error, it was still possible that some day a proof of the famous problem would be obtained along the lines which the deceased had indicated. "In fact," he continued with enthusiasm, standing there in the rain by the dead student's grave, "let us consider a function of one complex variable..."

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Pascual Jordan was, along with Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Wolfgang Pauli, one of the Wunderkinder contributing to the development of quantum mechanics. He had obtained his Ph.D. in 1924, at the age of 22. In the following year, together with his Ph.D. advisor Max Born and with Heisenberg, he created the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics, formulating the canonical commutation relations between position and momentum. Jordan kicked off quantum field theory, and found the anti-commutation relation for creation and annihilation operators of particles with spin 1/2. These particles, now known as fermions, actually could be linked directly to Jordan, were it not for a case of extremely bad luck. As Max Born remembers:

In December of 1925 I went to America to give lectures at MIT. I was editor of the Zeitschrift für Physik, and Jordan gave me a paper to be published in the journal. I didn't find time to read it and put it in my suitcase. I forgot about it, and when I returned half a year later and unpacked, I found the paper at the bottom of the suitcase. It contained the Fermi-Dirac statistics. Meanwhile both Fermi and Dirac had discovered it. But Jordan was the first.

Monday, December 12, 2011

In 1904, Max Born, a German born physicist who would win the Nobel prize in 1954, went to Göttingen to study mathematics and physics. He soon made friends with Professor Karl Schwarzschild, who taught astronomy, and at that time was not much older than his students. Schwarzschild's name might be familiar to you from the Schwarzschild-metric - the first known exact solution to Einstein's field equations that he would derive about a decade later.

In their book "Der Luxus des Gewissens" (The Luxury of Conscience) by Max Born and his wife Hedwig, Born recalls that he used to play tennis with Schwarzschild. Max Born (who was called "Maxel" by his friends) liked Schwarzschild's astronomy class, but did not feel very inspired by the lectures on geometry, held by the great mathematician Felix Klein, namegiver of the Klein bottle:

"He said, half a year is more than enough time to learn all of astronomy."

Max passed the oral exam in astronomy, even though he answered the question "What do you do when you see a falling star?" with "I make a wish!" and only after Schwarzschild's further inquiry remembered to add "I note down the time and location, the direction and the length of the visible trace."

Sunday, December 11, 2011

"I was a visiting member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in 1955. It was a Good Friday in April and Einstein was looking for the Institute bus to take him back home to 112 Mercer Street. Being Good Friday, the driver was on holiday amd I offered to drive him home. We had a wonderful conversation and at one point he asked me what I was working on. I told him Lie groups. He then remarked, wagging his finger, that that will be very important. Actually, I was quite surprised that he knew who Lie was. About a week later Einstein was dead."

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Of course we cannot allow Richard Feynman to be missing when we tell physics anecdotes. He told his anecdotes well himself, and they have been captured by Ralph Leighton in the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" One of my favorites is this story:

I don't know why, but I'm always very careless, when I go on a trip, about the address or telephone number or anything of the people who invited me. I figure I'll be met, or somebody else will know where we're going; it'll get straightened out somehow.

One time, in 1957, I went to a gravity conference at the University of North Carolina. I was supposed to be an expert in a different field who looks at gravity. I landed at the airport a day late for the conference (I couldn't make it the first day), and I went out to where the taxis were. I said to the dispatcher, "I'd like to go to the University of North Carolina."

"Which do you mean," he said, "the State University of North Carolina at Raleigh, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?"

Needless to say, I hadn't the slightest idea. "Where are they?" I asked, figuring that one must be near the other.

"One's north of here, and the other is south of here, about the same distance."

I had nothing with me that showed which one it was, and there was nobody else going to the conference a day late like I was.

That gave me an idea. "Listen," I said to the dispatcher. "The main meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying things to each other, like 'Gmunu.Gmunu.'"

His face lit up. "Ah, yes," he said. "You mean Chapel Hill!" He called the next taxi waiting in line. "Take this man to the university at Chapel Hill."

Friday, December 09, 2011

When Max Planck had finished high school in 1874, he was unsure which career path to chose. He had many different talents and interests, and pondered becoming a concert pianist, or study classical philology, or maybe mathematics and physics. Planck's father, a professor of law, mediated an appointment with his colleague, physicist Philipp von Jolly, for Max to get some advice. Prof. Jolly was a bit gloomy about the prospects of physics, and didn't want to raise false hopes in the young man. As Max Planck remembered,

Philipp von Jolly described physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science, which was about to reach a final form, now that the principle of conservation of energy had been discovered. He thought that there may be a speck or a vesicle left to be studied and classified in one or the other angle of the field, but that as a whole, the system had a fairly safe standing, and that theoretical physics was approaching the same degree of perfection reached by geometry already centuries ago.

Max Planck did not let himself be dissuaded from studying physics by this assessment, and the rest is history.

Thursday, December 08, 2011

When Herr Professor Doktor Einstein and his wife visited Mr and Mrs Hubble at Mt Wilson, at one stage the two ladies were left alone to swap confidences. Mrs Hubble pointed at the great telescope and explained that her husband used it “to study the nature of the universe” whereupon Frau Einstein retorted that “my husband does that on the back of an old envelope!”

Submitted by Cormac O' Raifeartaigh. This anecdote is mentioned for example in “The Day We Found the Universe” by Marcia Bartusiak.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

The two German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck won the Nobel Prize in 1914 and 1925 respectively. When the Nazis grew strong in Germany von Laue and Franck sent their medals, made of 23-karat gold, to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. During these troublesome times many people were hiding or burying their family jewelry or anything of timeless value that they wanted to keep out of the Gestapo's hands, though it was illegal to send valuables out of country.

Unfortunately, by 1940 the Nazis made it to Copenhagen. Bohr was now in possession of two large gold pieces that carried von Laue's and Franck's names and clearly left Germany unapproved. Bohr had to get rid of the Nobel medals, and quickly so. It was Georgy de Hevesy, a colleague and friend from the department of chemistry, who came up with a ingeneous solution, quite literally: he would dissolve the medals.

Now gold is a precious metal and what makes it so precious is that it is slow to react with anything. It takes a mixture of acids known as aqua regia and time to dissolve gold, but at the end of a seemingly endless afternoon the medals were gone and left was a glass with a bright orange solution that didn't catch the interest of the Nazis.

But that wasn't the end of the story. After the war, de Hevesy returned to his lab and found the orange solution undisturbed in his shelf. He precipitated out the gold and sent it back to the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm. They recast the medals and gave them back to von Laue and Franck.

Sunday, December 04, 2011

In Stefan's bookshelf I found a little book "Einstein privat" by Friedrich Herneck who, on the book cover, is described as "one of today's leading Einstein researchers." Herneck interviewed Einstein's former household aid, Herta W., about everything from Einstein's smoking habits, over nicknames used in the family to how often Einstein fed the goldfish. Herta W. had the following to say about Einstein's haircut which, next to going sockless, has become trademark of the ingenious theoretical physicist:

"When his hair grew too long, when it got really intolerable, then [his wife Elsa] cut his hair off with a scissor. He let her do that. But since Frau Professor was very shortsighted and, during cutting, could not always use her Lorgnette... But Herr Professor could not be bothered to see a professional barber."

"Frau Professor" is (here) the form of address for the professor's wife and a lorgnette are old-fahioned glasses that have to be held on a handle in front of one's eyes. Later in the interview there's more talk about Frau Professor's shortsightedness and it seems it was indeed serious. She was however too vain to permanently wear thick glasses.

Saturday, December 03, 2011

Lara and Gloria are now 11 months old. They can both stand, on wobbly knees, though most of the time they insist on holding onto the furniture. Lara has half of a first tooth and a second in the making, and Gloria's first tooth is just about visible. I of course have dutifully brushed Lara's halftooth with pink toothpaste, which she seems to find very amusing. The babies have both suffered through their first cold, luckily a mild version, and have learned to nibble on bread and cookies.

It is interesting to see how different the girls are, even though they share not only the same parents, but also a room, clothes and toys. Lara is now a few centimeters taller and also an estimated two pounds heavier than Gloria. (We'll know more precisely at their next doctor's visit, which is in 2 weeks.) When Gloria falls, she inevitably starts crying dramatically until you pick her up. When Lara falls, she might make some surprised sound, though not always, and just move on. She does however occasionally start crying just because her sister cries. Gloria sucks her thumb (the left one), day and night; Lara never does. Lara does however gnaw on the bedposts with her half tooth.

Trying to change Lara's cloths has become a fight because she kicks, throws towels and cloths around, and tries to grab everything close enough. If you pull her away or turn her back around, she laughs and tries even harder. Gloria is one charmingly smiling baby on the changing table, as long as she has her rubber ducky to suck on. But try to take the ducky away...

I meanwhile am fighting once again with the paperwork. Not only are my Swedish parental benefits running out on Tuesday, but the Germans are refusing to pay Stefan's parental benefits. After a lot of calls and letters, it turned out that they seem to have misread one of the Swedish documents I sent them and thought the amount I got for 5 months was for one month, then concluded we're too rich to apply for benefits in Germany. Now they want more paperwork, that I have to rout to Sweden and back. For that and some other reasons I am somewhat stressed out in these darkest weeks of the year, so excuse the lack of originality on this blog. Finally, Lara sends her greetings:

In 1958, Pauli and Heisenberg were working an a unified theory which is today still the holy grail of particle physicists. Heisenberg gave a talk about their recent results, appearing confident that they had found a unified theory, only technical details were missing. An eager journalist who sat in the audience spread the news about the "world-equation," very much to Pauli's dismay. In a 1958 letter to George Gamov, Pauli commented on Heisenberg's radio announcement: "This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing," illustrated by an empty rectangle.

This alleged all-explaining world equation came about before Yang and Mill's contribution to physics became appreciated. Looking at the Lagrangian in question today, it doesn't seem to be gauge invariant and with a four-fermion coupling won't fare well in terms of renormalizability.

Friday, December 02, 2011

The Zeeman effect is the splitting of spectral lines in an external magnetic field, first observed by Pieter Zeeman in the late 19th century. The magnetic field removes a degeneracy between electron shells with different magnetic quantum number. By 1920 that was fairly well understood, unfortunately most of the observed atoms showed much more complicated spectra than expected. This became known as the "anomalous Zeeman effect" and caused the theoretical physicists of the time quite some headache. We know today that the additional splitting is due to the electron spin, but it was still a decade till Dirac would write down the equation for spin 1/2 particles that is now named after him. Recalling the time in 1946, Wolfgang Pauli wrote:

“A colleague who met me strolling rather aimlessly in the beautiful streets of Copenhagen said to me in a friendly manner, “You look very unhappy,” whereupon I answered fiercely, “How can one look happy when he is thinking about the anomalous Zeeman effect?””

Thursday, December 01, 2011

Reminded by a recent comment, Stefan and I noticed that time has come to open the first door on the advent calendar. This year, we will have a daily anecdote from the lives and works of well-known physicists. These are all quotations or stories that many of you will be familiar with from your physics lectures, but I hope for the rest of our readers it will be a little daily entertainment one the way to the holidays. We also have a few anecdotes that while widely known I learned are actually fabricated.

Unfortunately, Stefan's and my brainstorming only brought up 19 items! So we need you to help us out: Send us your favorite physics anecdote or quotation (if possible with source), or we'll run out of stories a week before Christmas. To save an element of surprise for our readers, please do not post it in the comments here, but send an email to hossi[@]nordita.org (remove brackets), subject: physics anecdote. Don't be shy, I won't tell anybody you're reading blogs ;o)

We start today with the 1st anecdote. It's one of my favorites and, I guess, probably also among the best known ones. A journalist who goes under the name Roundy, interviews Paul Dirac. The interview appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal in April 1929 and its complete version can be found on this website.

"Professor," says I, "I notice you have quite a few letters in front of your last name. Do they stand for anything in particular?"

"No," says he.

"You mean I can write my own ticket?"

"Yes," says he.

"Will it be all right if I say that P.A.M. stands for Poincaré Aloysius Mussolini?"

"Yes," says he.

"Fine," says I, "We are getting along great! Now doctor will you give me in a few words the low-down on all your investigations?"

"No," says he.

"Good," says I. "Will it be all right if I put it this way --- `Professor Dirac solves all the problems of mathematical physics, but is unable to find a better way of figuring out Babe Ruth's batting average'?"

"Yes," says he.

"What do you like best in America?", says I.

"Potatoes," says he.

"Same here," says I. "What is your favorite sport?"

"Chinese chess," says he.

That knocked me cold! It was sure a new one on me! Then I went on: "Do you go to the movies?"

"Yes," says he.

"When?", says I.

"In 1920 --- perhaps also in 1930," says he.

"Do you like to read the Sunday comics?"

"Yes," says he, warming up a bit more than usual.

"This is the most important thing yet, doctor," says I. "It shows that me and you are more alike than I thought. And now I want to ask you something more: They tell me that you and Einstein are the only two real sure-enough high-brows and the only ones who can really understand each other. I wont ask you if this is straight stuff for I know you are too modest to admit it. But I want to know this --- Do you ever run across a fellow that even you can't understand?"

"Yes," says he.

"This well make a great reading for the boys down at the office," says I. "Do you mind releasing to me who he is?"